Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls for the Sleet Day

We were stuck with such a winter weather mess last weekend, and what form it was to take or how much damage it might do proved impossible to predict. But it sure put me in a mood to make a batch of eggnog cinnamon rolls before my final holiday carton of it reached its unusable state.

Ooey gooey sweet and sensational, the fluffy cinnamon rolls produced from this particular recipe are consistent winners. I certainly didn't realize I'd left these aside for almost two years. They are heavenly bundles of sugar and spice, fully adorned with an irresistable eggnog and white chocolate glaze, and then raised to excess by a cream cheese icing.

This last picture (above) is how the rolls looked straight out of the oven, before they were amply doused by that afore-mentioned sugary glaze. Also: in my incessant disposition to count unimportant things, I'll call this the 25th batch of some sort of cinnamon roll that I've made since I started this blog in 2008.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

National Cinnamon Buns Day

My first full day at home after quite a stretch of "travel weeks" coincided with National Cinnamon Buns Day, and I was fully committed to its celebration. Well, not committed enough to make one of my better and more involved recipes, which is how I fell back onto what still proved to be an excellent choice: Perfectly Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls, the 2021 Recipe of the Year from King Arthur Baking. With a truly incredible soft dough and just the right amount of filling, adorned with my own cream cheese frosting (extra thick for oozing on a hot bun), these were a welcome return to these marvelous confections...the first version I've made since February 2024!

In the ongoing chronicle of all kinds of things here at the Roediger House, this was the 24th batch of something from the realm of actual cinnamon buns or cinnamon rolls or cinnamon roll sticky buns.

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"Perfectly Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls," from PJ Hamel and the Test Kitchen Team at King Arthur Baking.

Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls

Officially last Wednesday was National Sticky Buns Day, but I had to come in with the close approximation of just cinnamon rolls. But not just any ol' cinnamon rolls, but the dearly loved fluffy eggnog cinnamon rolls.

It was right in the middle of a couple of busy work days, so I prepped them all on Tuesday night and baked them Wednesday morning. Then I was able to take a handful of them with me to share with aspiring administrators on a clinical coaching rounds day over in Greensboro.

My first taste did not come, though, until after dinner that night, heated up just enough in the microwave to bring them back to life, plus more of that ridiculous white chocolate eggnog frosting atop. It was an amazing pile of hardcore sugar, when you get right down to it. (Since this was Batch No. 23 in the era of the blog, I guess it confirms my obsession.)

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Merry Christmas 2023

At the risk of getting the timeline all misconstrued on this here obsessively-reported blog, and putting out the warning that I've got a small backlog of almost a week for the latest entries, which means tomorrow's blog post will be about last Wednesday's supper, I'm pausing the process long enough to say it's a marvelous Christmas Day in the grey quiet of downtown Winston-Salem. The pups don't know it's a holiday but they begin every day excited about getting things underway, and regularly stare impatiently at any laggard owners taking too long with their coffee as we start upstairs:

Another special element of the day: opening up a wonderful new salt cellar from the dear compadre Amy, beautifully wrapped and thoughtfully chosen to perfectly align with my kitchen wants and needs:

I've just returned from a 4.1-mile stroll, passing two different postings of Jehovah's Witnesses plus a few other strollers and exercisers, and for me sped along a bit so I could get it done before the rains roll in later. But I also needed to walk off the celebratory sustenance that appeared magically at mid-day:

Fresh and hot, straight out of the oven, these are overnight brioche eggnog cinnamon rolls, bubbling beautifully—just before I poured an overabundance of eggnog-white chocolate icing over them:

The one on my plate barely had a chance to settle in against the ceramic surface because I impolitely scarfed it down in record time. I mean, cinnamon rolls are awesome. Homemade cinnamon rolls are glorious (this was Batch No. 22 of some kind of these). But when we roll up into this season of joy, the extra touches of rich egginess, full butter, and indulgent topping: my gosh, it was a tremendous gift to self.

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"Easiest Overnight Eggnog Brioche Cinnamon Rolls" [Published 21 December 2018], plus frosting based on "Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls" [Published 24 November 2020]. Both recipes from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest.

National Cinnamon Buns Day

If it offers the tiniest incentive for making a batch of cinnamon buns, I'll definitely fall in line for a "National Day Of" celebration. That was last Wednesday's fun culinary endeavor, with a more basic cinnamon bun recipe that resulted in truly pillow-soft sweet rolls of which two were consumed with zero hesitation once they were out of the oven and iced with vanilla glaze. Yum.

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"Perfect Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls," by Charlotte Rutledge of King Arthur Baking. See also: "Introducing Our 2021 Recipe of the Year: Perfectly Pillowy Cinnamon Rolls Are the Ultimate Soft Touch," by PJ Hamel. [Published 04 January 2021]

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

When I make cinnamon rolls and they are just too good, I find it easy to return somewhat quickly to them. Seven days after Batch No. 19, I whipped up Batch No. 20...same recipe but this time doing without the maple pecan "sticky bun" topping. Gracious, so good, with enough to share with neighbors and enough held in reserve to have more than too much for me. When the activities that had been scheduled for the penultimate day of February were canceled, it seemed a great alternative use of my time!

Cinnamon Roll Sticky Buns

Cinnamon Rolls Batch No. 19

Only because it is temporarily amusing, and the smallest needed catalyst to certain kitchen endeavors, this whole "National Day of..." silliness is still getting some mileage here. Take the highlighted designation for February 21st, which was not only Mardi Gras and National Pancake Day...but somebody also decided it was National Sticky Bun Day. So I made the full sugared and well-nutted combination of cinnamon rolls and sticky buns that proves to be pretty popular in this neck of the woods. These are not the style of cinnamon sticky buns that should be iced the way I did; instead, I should've dolloped the deliciousness of the vanilla bean cream cheese icing on the uprighted individual portions. So the only good picture I have is of the pan fresh from the oven. I do, however, have fantastic memories of many happy bites of several rolls reserved just for me.

Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls

Before we shift into the dark depths of winter and begin turning our attention to Mardi Gras, I've still got a little December holiday spirit to exorcise. Well, and enough eggnog still in the fridge for further kitchen creations. On Saturday morning, that feeling was channeled into yet another batch of eggnog cinnamon rolls, an indulgent breakfast treat that day but with enough to pass on to friends and neighbors. I was initially worried with the dough's first rise but the end results were spectacular, nonetheless!

This was Batch No. 18 of cinnamon rolls.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls

One might assume that I am rather taken with this seasonally-appropriate recipe for eggnog cinnamon rolls.

On the one hand, I might claim that it is continuing practice and refinement of my yeast dough and pastry skills, whereby glorious golden well-puffed results emerge after the proper rising time:

In reality, of course, I just really like cinnamon rolls.

My obsessive cataloguing of sweetly uninteresting tidbits continues: this was the 17th batch of cinnamon rolls I've made at the Roediger House.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls

When I made eggnog cinnamon rolls recently, it was actually just a trial run, because I felt sure I'd want to try them again for the crew that was here for Thanksgiving week. Sure enough, in the wee hours when their Saturday morning departure time came, I had ready for them piping hot and well-frosted cinnamon rolls, either for immediate consumption or to take away in a disposable cake slice caddy.

They sure were delicious all over again, perhaps because I doubled the amount of eggnog-spiked frosting but also because this time I remembered to add shavings of white chocolate to the filling!

My obsessive cataloguing of interesting tidbits continues: this was the 16th batch of cinnamon rolls I've made at the Roediger House.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls

After experiencing a disappointing cake catastrophe mid-week, I dusted myself off (with more flour, clearly) and dove into a whole 'nother baking project. A seasonably appropriate and seductive untried recipe became my Friday afternoon kitchen frolic, and out of the oven early evening came some rather amazing eggnog cinnamon rolls.

The dough worked smoothly and rose perfectly, and then rolled out with ease.

They baked up nice and golden.

The eggnog-spiked frosting was a perfect adornment.

My 15th batch of some form of cinnamon roll, in the books, and the verdict is Yum.

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"Easy Fluffy Eggnog Cinnamon Rolls," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 24 November 2020]

Glazed Cinnamon Roll Doughnuts

This year Tax Day was Monday April 18th, a cold and dreary and depressingly rainy day. Or: perfect for the long hours at the kitchen table, working through all the forms and documentation and instructions and calculations. Once it is all done and dropped off at the post office, my thoughts turn to how best to reward those labors, which is often with some wonderful baking endeavor in mind. The next day, Tuesday, I got busy with a new recipe: fried glazed cinnamon roll doughnuts.

The dough rose wonderfully.

Just like regular cinnamon rolls, you spread the cinnamon-brown sugar filling onto the dough and roll it up and cut the rounds for rolls.

They also rose up well.

The fallacy in the recipe or the foolishness in my approach resides in this simple dilemma: how in the world would a cinnamon-sugar filling stand up to deep frying? So the first rolls unraveled and shed their sweet internal goodness into the frying oil.

The later ones held up better when I tried to pinch all the dough a bit tighter. The simple vanilla glaze was quite good. These rascals were something! For my 14th attempt at some form of cinnamon roll, according to my blog entries, this one was a unique belly-pleaser.

My experience with doughnuts is limited, at least from the standpoint of making them. I tried Krispy Kreme copycats back in 2014, and I made Cro-Nuts in 2020. I've also tried my hand twice at beignets, once back before building the new kitchen and again in 2013.

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Wait: there's more! I made a base for vanilla ice milk and churned it the next morning so that it would set up by that Wednesday evening...

...at which time I heated up a skillet, put some pats of butter in it, sliced a couple of the remaining cinnamon roll doughnuts, and griddled them to a chewy toasted gloriousness, so that I could add more of the glaze and then top them with scoops of that creamy vanilla ice milk. This let me approximate the "grillswith" dessert popular at the University Diner, the White Spot, and the former Sloan's in Charlottesville, where I lived in the late 1990s. (A fuller related blog post can be found here.) Oh. My. Gosh. A. Maze. Zing.

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Based on "Dunkin Style Cinnamon Rolls," from Nazeeha Khan of My Secret Bakes.

"Simplest Vanilla Glaze," by Mark and Michael Klebeck with Jess Thomson. In Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts: Secrets and Recipes for the Home Baker. San Francisco: Chronicle Books (2011), p. 132.

"Classic Vanilla Ice Milk," by Stella Parks, Pastry Wizard of SeriousEats.com. [Published 22 August 2018 / Updated 15 April 2020]

Cinnamon Roll Sticky Buns: Batch No. 13

As someone who is regulary susceptible to letting deadlines dictate when I tackle tasks, it was a delightful surprise when I got my taxes done a month earlier than when they were due. That's very unlike me. And I had a couple of mornings in a row with pleasant weigh-ins, as I keep track of my eating and diet. It put me into a celebratory mood, and I reached for a rare and glorious special recipe for cinnamon roll sticky buns.

The dough was exceptionally responsive and easy to work with.

With good Irish butter and dark brown sugar, with true Ceylon cinnamon, I got a good layer of filling spread and topped it with finely chopped pecans.

The second rising went well, with the individual rolls puffing up gloriously.

I probably could have let 'em bake a few more minutes but squishy cinnamon rolls are still cinnamon rolls.

Because they are both cinnamon pecan rolls and sticky pecan rolls, the recipe recommends flipping them over so that the oozy-goozy maple syrup-brown sugar-butter with pecan halves, in and on which the rolls baked, can become the topside and ooze back down into the rolls.

This batch, which is the 9th time I've this version of pecan sticky buns, and the 13th of any kind of cinnamon roll, was as good as they've ever been. And it's not just because of the healthy dollop of unhealthy cream cheese vanilla bean frosting.

Red Hot Velvet Cinnamon Rolls with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting

Only a few days after my most recent attempt at cinnamon rolls, and I decided to take a deep dive into a distractingly funky variation on these delightful pastries: red velvet cinnamon rolls! That's what I found myself tackling last Friday night, carrying over into Saturday morning. It's a yeasty dough but leads to a somewhat pudding-cakey result but it's not without its fun and allure. Perhaps because of the amount of cinnamon-sugared butter that serves as the filling, combined with the wetness of the dough itself, it was hard to serve it up as a constituted whole...each one managed to break or smoosh in some way as I portioned out the individual servings, so the pics are not glorious.

But I could still be cautiously happy about the reviews from the neighbors with whom I shared it:

"I greatly approve. I agree, nothing like I've ever had before, really unique. BUT it was delicious!"

"You are a mad genius, Ray, this is amazing! I am in love with the texture - thank you for sharing!"

"They are like a dessert you would try in a foreign country. Reminds you of a few things you had back in the States, but also not like anything you'd ever had before. Super sweet and familiar yet strange."

Well, mostly happy. We shall count these as my 12th batch of cinnamon rolls, in the ongoing chronicle of them.

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"Red Hot Velvet Cinnamon Rolls with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting," from Juliana of the Haute + Heirloom blog. [Published 12 February 2012]

Cinnamon Roll Sticky Buns: Batch No. 11

As I confessed back at the end of March, in the blog entry noting the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic shut-down of the city and of the state, I was among those swept up by the hoarder's shopping instinct, which led to rather huge bags of flour and sugar (well, one of each) in the butler's pantry. But I didn't follow through with the mad baking quite like most folks did (and there was never any sourdough experiment undertaken at the Roediger House). All that flour, though, did bring dancing thoughts of various baking endeavors to mind, which I have mostly failed to follow through on.

Alas, the siren call I finally could not resist hit me last Monday evening, and I prepped a double batch of cinnamon roll sticky buns, based on the perfect recipe I got many years ago.

Even though it's a double batch, let's still call it No. 11...and the first time I've made this recipe in almost exactly six years. True, using a laminated dough left over from making cheese danishes, I have somewhat recently made cinnamon rolls, which were also quite good, but they did not include pecans, nor did they have the "sticky" syrupy element that these do.

Because I started around 6 pm Monday night, I already had in mind that I'd prep them as far as the individual rolls were concerned but then tuck them away for the night in the fridge.

That way, I was able to bring them out, let them come to room temperature, rise a bit more, and then bake them up Tuesday morning. Not only did that make for a most excellent breakfast, it also set me up to offer them fresh and warm to neighbors on Spring Street and, of course, the Roediger House regulars that we've hardly seen for months.

If I've kept up properly via the various blog posts over the years, this is the ninth time I've made this recipe for sticky bun cinnamon rolls.

Other than sort of hacking a batch with that laminated dough back in the spring, I also once tried a recipe from Bon Appetit that was perfectly fine (back in 2012), but not as perfectly good as these.